Republicans See Opening in Obamacare's Poor Drafting

They can avoid expanding Medicaid while making the feds subsidize health insurance for the poor

Earlier this week, Governing detailed the backstory of the most important mistake in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), an oversight that led to Medicaid eligibility being set at 138 percent of the federal poverty level while eligibility for tax subsidies started at 100 percent, an error that had renewed significance in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to make the law's Medicaid expansion optional for the states.

What we didn't tell you was that one governor has already taken advantage of this loophole—and more might follow.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, an outspoken GOP critic of Obamacare, made waves last week when he proposed a unique way of not expanding Medicaid while still expanding insurance coverage, a plan that explicitly exploited this oversight by the law's authors. This is Walker's plan: he wants to scale back his state's Medicaid eligibility for low-income childless adults (the main population that benefits from the expansion) from 200 percent of the poverty line to 100 percent. That way, those under 100 percent are still covered by Medicaid, but those above 100 percent would buy private insurance on the state's new health insurance marketplace with a federal tax subsidy.